Should we commemorate the Black Saturday fires?

When anniversaries of tragedies are marked regularly, they take on other meanings and serve different purposes.

By John Schauble

February 7, 2014 — 3.00am

On the fifth anniversary of Black Saturday, what is it that we remember and why? Is commemorating disaster about honouring the dead, learning lessons from history or making myths?

Like many Victorians, I have a box of memories from Black Saturday and the days beyond. I don't open it very often. Many of those recollections are about fear, not for my personal wellbeing but for what might and eventually did unfold. Others are a firefighter's mental snapshots of fire and its aftermath that are, for the most part, best left safely locked away.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson.

On February 7, 2009, in the foothills below our community, a small fire gnawed at the edge of the forest. Had it not been held there by firefighters it would have burnt into our hilltop township in a matter of minutes.

As the local CFA captain, I understood what that would mean, because we had been there several times before. The last time it cost three lives and left more than 30 families homeless.

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To the north, the huge convection column from Kinglake blackened the sky; portent of a darker tragedy, the details of which would be unveiled in the days that followed. A crew and truck from our brigade was already on its way to Gippsland.

In the end, our community survived the 2009 fires physically unscathed; our brigade spent three more weeks fighting fires both locally and deep into the Yarra Ranges. Then it was over.

Anniversaries of public tragedies can become deeply artificial constructions. It seems they are most significant as markers for politicians, bureaucrats, the media, lobbyists and the sightseers of grief.

On one hand, they provide an opportunity to trumpet what has been achieved in the aftermath. On the other, it is a chance to finger-point at what has not been done to effect change. (Five years down the track, the afterburn of blame is less visceral but still burns strongly.)

For those who were intimately involved in an event, do point-in-time commemorations some years later serve any real purpose? More importantly, as the death, destruction and pain is dredged up and spread out in front of us all again, do they do harm rather than good?

Those most affected are confronted every day by memories and reminders: the missing family member, the home that is no longer there or the strange new one that has replaced it, the scarred landscape only gradually mending itself. Fire and its aftermath are an intensely personal experience as well as a collective one.

For other participants - including the firefighters, other emergency services personnel and recovery workers who responded - lessons learnt become part of post-disaster understanding and practice, often shared with colleagues through storytelling.

But the wider public memory of disaster and its remembrance are a different matter. Australians have a long tradition of commemorating tragic loss in quite formal ways. When communities across Australia lost a generation of young men in World War I, they memorialised them in public with plinths, statues and honour boards. The historian Ken Inglis argued this public memorialisation amounted to the creation of a civil religion in a society that had become largely apostate. Anzac Day, first marked in 1916, triggered myth and legend and history that remain deeply contested almost a century later.

In Gardens of Fire, a profound memoir of his experience of losing everything in the Black Saturday fires, another historian, Robert Kenny, also ponders the meaning of commemoration. Kenny survived as his home at Redesdale, near Bendigo, burnt down around him. Responding to a local gathering two years later to discuss how his local community might best memorialise the fires, he made the acute observation that ''in practice, those truly affected stay away, having learnt that to continually replay the trauma/memory in consciousness is to court madness''.

The need to commemorate, Kenny argues, is at once an attempt to reach out but also to appropriate the experience, to redress the balance between those who have lost and those who have not. That of itself can be a cathartic and deeply divisive experience that some communities struggle to overcome.

Many people in directly affected communities also use storytelling as a way of constructing their own narrative. The individual and collective construction of a narrative around what happened is an important part of recovery and renewal after fire. But to have that effect, the process must be one over which those affected have control.

As soon as commemorations become institutionalised or appropriated by the state, they almost inevitably take on other meanings and serve different purposes. They begin to form part of a different narrative and a different story. This is precisely what happened over the years to the Anzac story.

Days after Black Saturday, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd explicitly linked the Anzacs with volunteer firefighters, unwittingly perhaps excluding thousands of paid firefighters across the nation whose contribution doesn't fit the romantic ideal. Just as we remember, we also quickly forget. Yet another historian, ANU professor Tom Griffiths, notes in a book about Black Saturday in Steels Creek in the Yarra Valley that ''forgetting begins earlier than we know''.

Australians have been forgetting, if not simply denying, the place of fire in their landscape since the start of European settlement. The naturalness of it has been replaced by a cultural construct. Non-indigenous Australians have in essence not moved on from a 19th-century view of the landscape as something to be tamed and ultimately subdued, a resource to be exploited rather than a reality to be reconciled. Untamed fire has no place in that vision.

Griffiths advocates for a national fire day that will prompt Australians to remember but also think and plan constructively about fire. It's a nice idea but I'm not sure a perpetual anniversary would achieve that any more than any of the myriad other ''days'' in the national calendar.

What is certain is that ordinary Australians urgently need to start thinking for themselves more about fire.

John Schauble is a CFA brigade captain, who studied history and works for Victoria's Fire Services Commissioner.